


Prosody

by Ryo Hoshi (Hoshi_Ryo)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Cherub Psychology, Gen, Music, Parental Troll, Psychology, Xenopsychology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-03
Updated: 2013-05-03
Packaged: 2017-12-10 06:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/782990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hoshi_Ryo/pseuds/Ryo%20Hoshi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Calliope has always loved slam poetry, ever since her clownpater introduced her to the fine art of it, but music eludes her, despite being a Muse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prosody

**Author's Note:**

> _Written for[this prompt](http://homesmut.dreamwidth.org/39135.html?thread=42728671#cmt42728671) on the kink meme for "Calliope, gen, failing-at-left-brain-tasks."_
> 
>  
> 
> Lateralization was actually the specialty of one of the profs whose lab I worked in. You can relatively easily check yours—typically, your dominant hand is controlled by the dominant side of your brain, so if you're right-handed the left side of your brain is dominant. Mixed is reported primarily in left-handed individuals, though experience, such as music training, can cause shifts in brain structure that appear to be very long-term, if not permanent. How you think really can alter your brain.
> 
> Prosody is the musical aspect of spoken language and is normally processed in the language centers of the brain, at least when listening to a language you understand. It actually does provide a layer of meaning, and if you accept Hussie's assertion that everybody talks like they type—a bit of a feat in some cases—then Caliborn would be that person who speaks, always, with weirdly off cadences. And pauses in. Strange places. Possibly, too, monotone. Or emphasis falling in unusual _places_ that. Do not make sense. (If you don't get it: read it aloud, brief pauses on the commas, longer on the periods, italics are emphasis.)

You could remember the moment it registered that there really was this thing called music, and you had no awareness of it.

You were sitting on the lap of the surprisingly sweet troll clown who had been, early on in your life, a regular feature. You loved him, never mind that cherubs weren't supposed to. You knew, as soon as you were old enough to realize you were _not_ one, that you wanted to be a troll. Trolls understood, and the clown had smiled at you and told you that you were motherfucking right.

You loved your clownpater, loved listening to him spin tales with words while you listened, enraptured. You even picked up on subtexts, things you knew he wanted to say about how much he missed some of his troll friends, and you were so grateful that he had come to help you anyway and so sad that he had to give up his best friend for the sake of you and your brother.

You only realized that this slam poetry was a sort of 'music' during the next to last visit he made.

He'd been surprised, but smiled and told you that it was just all motherfucking musical miracles.

You bandaged his wounds, he always got them when your brother was awake, and listened as he talked.

Before he left temporarily, you decided to go ahead and ask him to find a way to leave permanently. As much as you knew you would miss him, would miss having him help with your horns and paint, you would not be able to take seeing him only getting hurt worse and worse. For all that his blood was a lovely color, you did not like seeing it.

His last visit was carefully timed, and he had brought gifts. You helped him with installing them, even if you were not sure what the encrypted key was about, though you understood quickly the purpose of the chains and shackles.

You smiled as he locked the one with your brother's sign onto your ankle, and thanked him. You didn't want to see his blood again, and if this was the price…

  


After it was all over and done—your brother defeated, yourself revived & no longer needing your paints and prosthetic to look like the troll you had always felt you were—you ran across a data grub that responded to your key, and found that it had the slam poems that you had always wished that clownpater would have felt able to share with you. You know, too, that this is a sign that clownpater had expected _you_ to find this; you are no longer at all able to even pretend that your brother would not have used these stories to hurt your mutual guardian, no matter how much clownpater was good to either of you it had simply been in your brother's nature to hurt things.

He enjoyed displays of troll pity and human affection, but vicariously. However, she'd been so strongly reminded of his feelings about such while watching that movie with Jane and Roxy—for all that her brother got pleasure from it, he also found it dirty & disgusting, something to punish. If your brother had found out about how clownpater had felt about his flush crush still, how he felt about his best friend/moirail even then…

You like listening to your clownpater's slam poetry, really. Reading a story to yourself simply does not compare, and you had always loved listening to your clownpater's voice. The cadence and prosody and ebb and flow of words was exquisite, even if you were rather certain that 'motherfuck' was not so much an insult as a placeholder, best understood as nearly meaningless syllables present for the sake of the sake of meter which simply did not translate so well to the written medium.

The humans around you have tried to share music with you—the handful of trolls left seem to find you with your lime blood daunting and confusing, especially since you kept all your powers, including the ones you would have had as a cherub. You've listened, not really understanding.

It's pure noise, often. Sometimes poems are recited over the noise. Maybe it's an acquired taste? Though the only thing you acquired was a headache.

You tried to explain, getting confused looks—was there something about this sort of poetry that you were missing?

The noise sounded like the things your brother had liked making, his art was horrible to all but himself, though you wondered sometimes if they were not somehow accurate portrayals of what he saw through your then-shared eyes. Did it sound pretty to him, somehow? Was it like how he seemed entirely unaware of the weird cadences his own words followed, the broken grammar and meter—and how frustrated he sometimes got with those whose words flowed smoothly?

It was easy to see why he had that strange hatecrush he had on Dirk Strider, he would have likely had one on Dave Strider as well if they had ever met. The times when they are actually being nice when doing slam poetry, or at least being douchebags to each other, are enjoyable. You think that you still prefer your clownpater's slam poems, but then one of your first distinct memories is him reciting a slam poem about how his little cherub wriggler was all up and made of miracles and how he had gone looking for art materials that were as miraculous as you were and the adventures he had gone on. You know you are likely quite biased, and never mind that you rather suspected that what he had actually done is obtained the captchalogue codes needed to make them with an alchemiter. To support this theory, you had found in the same cache as the slam poems a list of said codes, complete with their grist costs.

It still had been a wonderful story, and you had spent many a happy hour drawing about his adventures, though you do wonder a bit about how the trolls reacted to the one inspired by how he got your chalk through a hot, steamy black romance with a dragon. Did you draw the dragon wrong…?

  


It was Roxy, of course, who had figured out how to explain music to you. She had listened to you when you did your best to explain, knitting needles moving steadily, one of her cats stalking the ball of yarn. (You were relatively certain from the cat's voice and the two tails that this was a different cat from usual.) You sketched as you talked, deft lines capturing the essence of feline, and she asked, simply, if you had tried thinking of it as like a voice.

You had some idea what she meant. Your denizen had spoken with a voice that had no words, the semantic content instead somehow blossoming in your mind, the voice carrying a purely emotional and inflectional message.

If she was right, if you listened to it as if it was a language which you could not speak…

She offered you a pair of earphones, an in-ear set, the ones on bands simply did not work well for you anymore. You slipped them on as she put her own pair on, and leaned a little against her shoulder as she checked to make sure they were plugged into the splitter and the splitter firmly seated in her mp3 player.

It sounded _different_ from what they had normally played for you—it was done entirely with words, expressive readings of poems layered atop of each other to create the effect of depth, not layered atop of noise.

You relax, enjoying it. It was not the same as your clownpater's slam poems, nothing would be, but if this was what music sounded like to the others you could understand why they enjoyed it so much.


End file.
